


Enchanted

by f0rt1ss1m0



Category: Steven Universe (Cartoon)
Genre: Angst, Cinderella AU, F/F, Forbidden Love, Hurt/Comfort, Mutual Pining, OC-centric, Romance, Slow Burn, Star-crossed, completely self-indulgent
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2018-03-06
Updated: 2018-03-08
Packaged: 2019-03-27 20:20:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 2
Words: 3,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/13888419
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/f0rt1ss1m0/pseuds/f0rt1ss1m0
Summary: A prequel to The Last and the First.The story of two zircons: how they met and how they fell in love.





	1. Genesis

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [The Last and the First](https://archiveofourown.org/works/13037301) by [f0rt1ss1m0](https://archiveofourown.org/users/f0rt1ss1m0/pseuds/f0rt1ss1m0). 



> yes the title is from a 2010 taylor swift song. yes im currently ignoring de facto. no im not going to get a reasonable update schedule. NO my chapters will not have any reasonable or predictable length. kiss this ass

The first warp home was silent. Cold.

There were two gems in the warp stream. One was blue, tall and lithe, with her gem at her collar and pinning a ruffled cravat, and with her hair carefully tucked underneath a crescent-shaped headscarf. The other gem was brown, stout and short, with her gem at her hip, her pale curls long and loose, and a wrinkled cravat knotted crudely around her neck. Starlite Blue and Brown Zircon had left the Prime J2L Kindergarten in silence, and like so they traveled.

Brown could not help but steal glances at Blue Zircon. Her face had been the first that Brown saw when she emerged from the Kindergarten wall. A cool, pensive blue; with keen eyes and the soft smile that had welcomed her into the world.

Just a few hours ago.

* * *

She had emerged perfectly, according to schedule. “And from one of the last fertile patches of rock on Homeworld,” a green gem had bragged as Brown looked around the kindergarten. The brown, pockmarked walls stretched to the glittering pink sky. It was dim and warm, and there was a distinctly earthy smell that she could not yet place (it was soil). Her slim hand rested in Blue Zircon’s as she took her first steps.

“She’s perfect,” marveled Blue. “Even as a brown zircon, she’s...stunning.”

“She should be proud to be made in a Kindergarten like this,” said a second green gem, coming up to Brown. She was wearing shiny green sleeves, with weird silver fingers that spun and clicked. “And by some of the finest peridots in the galaxy, might I add.”

The two peridots chuckled. Brown didn’t see what was so funny about it. She just stared as one peridot pulled out a diamond-shaped screen and the second peridot reached to her belt to pick through her display of silver tools. At Brown’s side, Blue Zircon coughed.

“Alright, I know we need to do basic checks,” she said, “but I need to remind you that we’re on a tight schedule.”

“Calm your cobbles, Starlite,” the second peridot replied. She chose a tiny magnifying glass and bent over, holding the glass to the gemstone on Brown’s right hip. “5XG, pull up her records.”

“Facet 1J2L, Cut 9ZX?”

“Yep. Acute right tilt at forty-three degrees. No other abnormalities.” In response, the first peridot began tapping at her screen.

“Is the tilt bad?” asked Blue.

“No. Just annoying, since you can’t fix it,” said the peridot. “You yourself have an acute left tilt at about five degrees.”

Wide-eyed, Blue Zircon looked down to her collar gem, tried to gently twist it, and then glared at the peridot. “Thanks. For telling me.”

“You’re welcome.” The peridot put away the magnifying glass and pulled out a long strip of plastic, holding it up to Brown. Brown was a little taller than her. “Height 74 inches. Chest 37 inches. Hips 34 inches. How does that sound, 5XG?”

“Perfectly average, 2XA,” said Peridot 5XG.

“Good,” Peridot 2XA nodded.

Blue Zircon tapped her foot. Her hands were held tensely behind her back. “So can we — ”

“Starlite Zircon 1D7B-7EA, do you remember a single blazing thing about your own emerging?” 2XA snapped. “How long did they make you wait before heating you? That’s right, a lot longer than two minutes. Now shut up.”

Blue’s eye twitched. But she didn’t shoot back, even though she looked like she wanted to.

2XA stood straight up, just below Brown’s eye level, leaning forward almost close enough to touch her nose. Dubious, Brown leaned back.

“Do you know what you are?” asked Peridot 2XA.

Brown looked to Blue, who nodded silently.

“I am a zircon,” said Brown. Her voice was quiet and hoarse. It was very much like Blue’s.

“What is your purpose?”

Brown hesitated. She thought. She wasn’t sure at first, but then she stumbled on something, something that she wasn’t sure how it had got there. Something as innate and real as her own emotions.

“To fight for justice,” she answered at last.

2XA raised an eyebrow. “And who is your Diamond?”

Oh. Hmm. Brown hesitated again, and pondered deeply on that, but she wasn’t sure. She looked at Blue Zircon, silently pleading for help. Blue began shaping a word with her mouth, but no sound came out. It looked an awful lot like “you”.

“You?” Brown said, partly a question.

She wasn’t expecting Blue Zircon to cringe or Peridot 5XG to snort, but then they did. Peridot 2XA closed her eyes.

“That’s a new one,” she said, and then shook her head. “No. You were created to serve Blue Diamond. In a few hours, you will leave this Kindergarten to serve her sapphire and do your job, which your mentor will inform you more of. For now, we have some minor adjustments to make to your form.”

“Like what?”

2XA looked to Blue Zircon, but she turned away. She looked almost sad. “What?” Brown repeated, more confused.

“Well?” said 2XA, raising an eyebrow. “If your schedule is so tight, you’ll give the word.”

Blue took a deep breath, her fists clenching. Finally she said, “Do it.”

Brown opened her mouth to say, “Do what?” But something snagged her attention, and she looked down to see Peridot 2XA pull a sharp silver blade from her belt. Panicked, she tried to run, but she still stood in the entrance of her hole. There was nowhere to go. The blade pierced her bare torso, and she stared at it, wondering what would happen to her, and her form gave way in a burst of smoke. 


	2. The Young and Piteous

Once Brown Zircon had poofed, 2XA knelt and picked her up with just her fingertips. “Follow me,” she told 5XG and Blue Zircon, and they did.

The senior peridot led them through the serpentine halls of the Kindergarten, where swarms of other peridots worked on injectors, other holes, even a biotite who had just emerged. They only stopped at a green panel in the ground, which took them far, far down to a hallway and a laboratory. A kindergarten as prodigious as this had several special treatment rooms, and 2XA led them to one now. This room was brightly lit, jarringly so after the dimness of the Kindergarten, with nothing in it except a cylindrical pedestal in the center and a computer system along the wall.

“5XG, you may have the honors,” 2XA told her apprentice. As 2XA set Brown Zircon’s gem on the pedestal, then stepped back to stand beside Blue Zircon, 5XG sat at the computer and began pressing buttons.

“Zircon,” said 5XG flatly, “you never specified the desired coloring.”

“Oh. Change her to starlite blue, if you please,” replied Blue Zircon.

“Obviously. Which variant?”

“Um...the most vivid one. Like me. As requested by her commissioner.”

“Vivid value B5?”

“Yes. That.”

5XG turned and looked at her supervisor. 2XA raised an eyebrow at Blue Zircon.

“You understand,” said 2XA, “that treating a newly-emerged zircon any deeper than pale values B1 or 2 is incredibly risky. This young, she doesn’t yet know how to control her form.”

“I’m not at liberty to make that decision,” Blue countered. “I need to have a yes or no answer for my supervisor in less than an hour. If this zircon is still brown, she cannot appear in court for an upper-crust blue commissioner. It’s not proper.”

“Heat-treating a gem is not a matter of what’s ‘proper’. If she is damaged in the process — ”

“5XG, start the treatment,” Blue snapped. “Vivid value B5.”

“Fine,” muttered 5XG. With one button press a glass tube lowered over the pedestal, sealing shut with a sharp click, locking Brown’s gem inside. Blue Zircon felt a trickle of sweat roll down her cheek.

“You’re making a mistake,” said 2XA.

“I wish I didn’t have to,” replied Blue grimly.

The tube began to glow with heat.

* * *

 

Inside her gem, Brown had been sitting peacefully. A little confused, of course, but peaceful.

Then her world caught fire.

It had been dark before, complete pitch dark with nothing as far as her eye could see, and now it glowed red. So red it seared her eyes. Terrified, Brown tried to move, but there was nothing under her feet. Pain stabbed her hip, right under her gem, and then flooded her whole body. The light roared loud enough to deafen. She began to scream — she wasn’t sure at what, but it tore itself from her lips as the agony lapped up her body.

_What did I do? The blue zircon said I was beautiful; was that bad? Is it because I answered a question wrong? Is this the treatment?_

_Am I going to die?_

Then, instantly, as quickly as it had begun, the heat switched off and Brown was delved again into darkness.

For a second, she felt raw, wounded all over, capable of nothing except curling into the fetal position and leaking tears from between eyelids that were clenched shut against the lingering pain. Then, deep in her subconscious, she realized that the pain had another outlet, and it began leaking out like those tears. Slowly, without meaning to, Brown began to reform.

She collapsed to the cold ground on her hands and knees, her vision blurred and glassy. There were feet all around, and hands on her arms, helping her up. When she blinked, she saw Blue Zircon’s face again. Then the two peridots. They were all smiling. Why were they smiling?

“Well, I’ll be drilled,” said 2XA. “It worked.”

Blue Zircon’s smile was the widest of all, so much that it trembled. “I’m so sorry about that,” she babbled, “but if I had told you what was going to happen, you wouldn’t have let us do it.”

“Do what?” Brown croaked.

“Well — heat-treating you, of course! It’s so expensive to make blue zircons from scratch, so they make brown zircons and then heat us up again to turn us blue. I had to do it when I first emerged, and look at me now! Look at US now! We match, isn’t that nice?”

Excited, Blue slipped her hand under Brown’s, then lifted it up so their palms met. Their...blue palms. As if Blue had shocked her, Brown recoiled, staring at her hands — they were a vivid, aqua blue exactly like Blue Zircon’s. Her skin almost seemed to shimmer in the light.

“5XG, get her a mirror!” Blue called, and Peridot 5XG pulled a small round disk from the desk drawer.

Carefully, Blue opened it, folding the lid back to reveal a shiny piece of glass. When Brown took it and looked, she gasped. For the first time, she saw herself — a blue zircon now, with a regal face, a long, dignified nose, and big blue eyes that glittered like the gemstone on her hip. Her white hair was short and full, tumbling down to brush her thin, bare shoulders. She realized, with some shame, that she was the only gem here who was naked.

“How do I…?” she started, but couldn’t figure out how to end the sentence, so she just pointed to Blue Zircon.

“Oh, of course!” 2XA said. “Appearance modifiers. Just...IMAGINE yourself having them on. Will it into existence. Yes, just like this zircon’s.”

Okay...she supposed she could do that. Closing her eyes, Brown tried to think of herself in a pale blue suit like Blue Zircon’s, with a little fluffy cravat. And when she looked down again, there it was. Blue Zircon practically squealed.

“Oh, you look so good! Now — try a headscarf. It’s just a piece of fabric, folded up around your hair, its alright if it’s not as pointy as mine at first, that takes practice…”

With some effort, Brown willed it into existence. She looked over her shoulder and saw both 2XA and 5XG typing furiously, conversing quietly with each other.

“I suppose that data could be outdated,” suggested 5XG.

“That data is less than two hundred years old,” replied 2XA. “This zircon is just an outlier. A functional outlier, but one nonetheless. We’ll have to keep an eye on her.”

Brown didn’t know what they were talking about, so she turned back to Blue. “How do I get...that thing?” she asked, pointing to the glass disc over Blue’s right eye.

“A monocle?” asked Blue. “Oh, yes! That’s also in your programming, somewhere. Try to draw it out like everything else. It’s a little harder. But it’s in there, just reach inside.”

“Okay,” Brown nodded, and closed her eyes again.

Reach inside...reach inside. She felt something just barely too far, deep inside her just like Blue had said, so she stretched, willing it to come to her and shape itself into a monocle…

_“AAAH!”_

Her hip gave out from under her, and she crumpled to the floor. Sharp pain, worse than even that of the heat treatment, rushed through her gem. And she screamed. She knew Blue Zircon and the peridots were rushing around her, but she couldn’t say anything. It felt as if her whole body was clenching a fist around on broken glass, grinding it deep into her form.

She did not ask if she was going to die. She asked, instead, if she could — if anything could take her out of this.

And then, again, it was over as soon as it began.

She lay on the cold floor again, curled tightly on her side. Tears coated her face. But this time, nobody reached down to help her. Something was wrong. It was just silent in the room, besides the faint hum of the computer and the whimpers that couldn’t help but leak from Brown’s lips. Something was wrong.

Something was terribly, terribly wrong.

The mirror had crunched in her fist. When she opened her fingers, the cracked plastic fell away and the mirror itself was fissured into three pieces, barely held together by its rubber backing. Slowly, dreading what she would find, she lifted the mirror and looked.

She was brown again. The blue treatment was gone, reversed just like that, and the only signs that it had ever been there was a faint ring of blue in her dark brown eyes, the azure corona of a dying star...her proud, shapeshifted scarf was gone; her sickly blond curls fell into her face...and then — she hadn’t been sure at first because of the cracks in the glass — she realized that the very shape of her face was warped; her cheeks were now round with fat and her eyes were too big and her nose was no longer regal, just awkward, out of place. Her entire body was like that. Unbalanced. Short. Fat. Brown.

“Ew, that’s disgusting!” Peridot 5XG squeaked. Gasping, Blue Zircon punched her on the arm.

“Are you DENSE?! Don’t say that!” Blue scolded, but the damage had already been done. Tears rolled unbidden down Brown’s cheeks and her shoulders began to tremble. When Blue knelt to comfort her and put her hand on her shoulder, she only started crying more. She couldn’t stop it.

“Oh no, oh no no no, don’t cry! This can be fixed! We can fix this!” Blue kept saying. But the peridots did not respond. They just stared grimly down at the two zircons, and Brown knew what they wouldn’t say — that they weren’t sure if Blue was right.

“There has to be a way,” continued Blue. “Can’t we try the heat treatment a second t — ”

“NO!” Brown shrieked. “No, no, please, it hurts, it hurts…”

“I KNOW it hurts, but you can’t stay like this!” Blue’s voice reached fever pitch and she reached for Brown’s arms, but Brown panicked, accidentally hitting Blue in the nose. “Ow — look, please, you have to understand, I can’t bring you back like this!”

“I don’t care!” she wailed, curling tighter into herself and burying her face in her hands. “I won’t, I won’t, I WON’T!”

“She’s right, Zircon,” snapped Peridot 2XA. “We took one risk in heating her at all, but as it stands, your manager is liable for this. If we treat her a second time, we can be held liable for the damages.”

Blue Zircon fell silent and her warm hands slowly left Brown’s shoulders. “Is there nothing you can do?” she asked the peridots.

“This doesn’t exactly happen every rotation,” said 2XA dryly. “These are unusual circumstances; protocol calls that we would usually — ”

“What would you normally do?”

2XA glared at her, clearly not happy with the interruption. “I was going to say,” she replied, “that we would harvest her.”

Brown did not know what that meant. But Blue did, because it showed on her face. “You will not do that,” Blue finally said. “I request, at the very least, a further examination. Please.”

The peridots exchanged a glance. Then 2XA seemed to come to a decision, at which 5XG lowered her head.

“Come with me,” said 2XA at last, grabbing Brown Zircon’s arm.

* * *

The examinations proved what they already knew — the damage was irreversible.

For one hour, Brown lay on a cold white table, strapped down with tubes and wires as the peridots poked and prodded her. They seemed to speak only in code, in numbers and words that Brown couldn’t understand, but their flat, solemn tones gave it all away. And if Blue Zircon understood any of it, the distress on her face in response was enough to translate. Finally, the peridots turned off the computers and went to Blue Zircon.

“As the most senior gem present,” said 2XA solemnly, “it is your decision on how to proceed. Permission to harvest.”

Brown met Blue’s eyes. She wasn’t really sure what the peridots were talking about, and she wanted to ask, but they had stuffed a wad of cotton in her mouth for one of the tests and failed to take it out. Blue’s eyes were wide, and her breath hitched in her throat before she tore her gaze away.

“Permission denied,” said Blue instantly. 2XA raised an eyebrow, but nodded, and sent 5XG over to undo Brown’s straps.

* * *

That was how Brown and Blue Zircon ended up alone together in a warp stream, Blue’s hands clasped together behind her back, the wind cold and whistling between them. Brown stared down at herself. Her misfitting cream suit, her stubby fingers and hands, the pale curls whipping in front of her eyes. Her brown gem. Then she looked back up at Blue Zircon — tall. Slim. Blue. Something was wrong. Something was very wrong, and Brown Zircon could feel it in the core of her very being, but she did not know what it would mean for her.

“Blue?” Brown asked quietly. “What’s going to happen?”

Blue said nothing. Then she closed her eyes. “I don’t know,” she confessed. “But there’s nothing left we can do.”

The ride was silent. Cold.


End file.
